Level 6: Garde Manger

Garde Manger is the station that handles all of the salads, soups and most of the cold appetizers. The dishes this level aren’t hard to make but require a lot of prep work and most of dishes have multiple little elements.

The consommé was the first dish and chef gave us an easy way to remember the clarification formula.

Per liter of Marmite/stock:
30g Vegetable
100g Egg White
100g Ground Meat

The garnishes for this dish are chicken mousseline quenelles, peas, asparagus and haricot vert. Straight forward and pretty easy. I’m hoping this is one of my final dishes.

The Lobster Panna Cotta is a real straight forward dish that needs a bit of time management control and not much else.

-Cook the lobster
-cool the lobster
-cook the cauliflower
-put gelatin in iced water
-puree the cauliflower
-reserve a little puree for garnish
-taste and adjust seasoning
-mix the gelatin into the hot puree
-plate the Panna cotta on a flat table
-allow to cool
-wrap and refrigerate
-make lobster salad
-make garnishes

Could live without this one on the final, but still better than pastry…

5 Down…1 Left

Five levels done…it has gone by so fast and I am really excited to be moving into the final level. I’m ready to move on and put my focus into my own kitchens. It’s been really hard trying to focus on the restaurants when waking up at 5:30 then getting home close to 12 hours later…not much focus left at that point except to take a shower, eat and hang out with my wife for a couple of hours before hitting the sheets. My weekends are the days I look forward to just for the few extra hours of sleep in the morning…then head into Nikos for dinner. But soon my schedule will be back to normal and FCI and the daily NYC commute will be behind me.

Level 5 was fun but honestly a little boring. The first half of the days were spent prepping my mis en place for the lunch service that usually never exceeded 50 covers.

I will need to focus a little harder on these level 6 recipes because they will be on the final at the end of the month.

20 days left…

Day27: Cremes & Xmas Feast

(Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  I wrote this post a few days ago in my notebook but have been too busy to type it out, so it might sound a little dated…)

Starting to move into the unknown world of pastry for these next couple of days and just hope they move quickly. We started with cremes for our first lesson.  Creme caramel a baked custard,  very popular French dessert which is also very well known in Latin American cuisine, but they call it Flan.  Creme anglaise, the base for the traditional vanilla iced cream and a very simple recipe in theory but can be a little tricky in practice I soon found out. I scrambled my first batch!  Creme patissiere or pastry cream was also a very easy recipe, and this one I actually got right.

Technique was pretty similar in most of these recipes, blancher for example is the mixing of egg yolks and

sugar until the sugar is dissolved and a light-yellow airy custard is formed. We also were taught how to make Pate a Choux, Cream Puff Dough which we stuffed with the pastry cream. The Choux can also be used for savory preparations.

Cooking Christmas dinner this year was a completely new animal for me. Normally the duties get passed off between my mother and my sister in law, but I guess we figured this year since I am in culinary school that I should give it a go. The menu; Prime Rib Bone-In Roast, Mashed Potatoes and for the appetizers they were contributed by the rest of the fam. Everything came out great but was way too much food as usual. Next year I wanna give a little more planning and prep time.  The sauce that I made I was not crazy about mainly because I had to settle for store bought “organic” beef stock, that stuff is not really any good and I most likely won’t use it again.

Day26: Eggs

HardBoiled, SoftBoiled, in Cocotte, in Plate, SunnySide, Poached, Submersion Circulator Poach, Flat Omelets, Rolled Omelets…if it had anything to do with eggs today, we either made it or demoed it.

Egg cookery is an easy way to evaluate how well somebody cooks. Eggs are very fragile and burn very quickly and easily if not handled correctly. Low and slow is the best way to cook them, it takes a good amount of patience to cook the perfect egg.

One really helpful pointer I learned today was when we were poaching our eggs. Once you get the water to the correct poaching temperature (180-190) you create a vortex or whirlpool effect in the pot with your spoon, then quickly and carefully place your egg in the middle of the vortex. This helps with the folding over the yolk and pretty much does all of the work for you.

Tomorrow: Crèmes…and then a 4 day weekend!

Day25: Farces & FoodCost

Not a really exciting day of cooking but I learned some
pretty useful stuff. It’s basically a way of training your mind to
get the most out of every product and to minimize waste. This is a
really important concept when running a restaurant, and plays a
huge role in lowering your food cost which equates into more
profit. Eggs will be the topic of discussion tomorrow, and I have a
feeling I will be pretty sick of them by the end of the
day…

Day24: Organ Meats

All I have to say is sweetbreads and breakfast should never be even thought of in the same sentence. The creamy richness of the organ meat was way too much for me today and I only tasted a very little bit of the food today. I really enjoyed to sauces that we made today. The sweetbreads we served with a brown butter, capers and lemon sauce. The kidneys with a brandy, shallot and cream sauce. The liver dish was my favorite sauce and was a variation from what the text book suggested. First we browned the onions then added a little white wine vinegar followed by a little maple syrup. That reduced down to a thick syrup and then I added the veal stock, seasoned with salt and pepper and turned off the heat and then mounted with a spoon full of cold butter. A very good balance of tangy and sweet.

Tomorrow is our first test of the level, I just finished reviewing for it and I think I have a good handle on the material. Also tomorrow: Farces, Forcemeat and Stuffings with some Food-Cost stuff thrown in.

Day23: Major Proteins & Mixed Cooking Techniques

It was a fun day working with lamb and rabbit, with the main focus of the day being braising or mixed cooking methods. For the lamb recipe we were working with a fore shank and served that with couscous. The rabbit was a bit more labor intensive, mainly because we had to break it down and debone it. Starting by splitting the rabbit in half through the spine, and then breaking it down into 4 sections. 1) The Forelegs which don’t have much meat at all, we used them to reinforce the sauce. 2) The Ribs, a huge part of why it was so labor intensive because Chef wanted us to “French” them! Literally the size of toothpicks and just as brittle. 3) The Loin & Belly, the tenderest meat but not much to fight over. 4) The Hindlegs, which we used for the braising part of the recipe. We plated the dish as a Trio of Rabbit over a buttery Pommes Puree. The rabbit was cooked perfectly!

This was not my first time braising a lamb shank but was a first for me working with couscous. This was unbelievably easy! Boil a little chicken stock, rub a little Olive Oil into the couscous, some salt and pepper and then pour the stock right onto the couscous just enough to cover the grain. Covered it with plastic wrap and put it to the side until the lamb shank was ready.

Our first test of level 2 is on Tuesday, but tomorrows hurdle “Organ Meats”. This should be interesting!

Day22: Veal & Pepin

Tired…very tired. I got a few hours of sleep last night but I guess it wasn’t that great. I was definitely dragging ass today but managed to turn out our two dishes on time and successfully. We poached a short rib for the first recipe and mine could have definitely benefited from a little more cooking time. The second recipe, veal shoulder poached and served in a veloute with pearl onions and button mushrooms was a really tasty dish and came out great.

A terrible day to be exhausted when Jacques Pepin is in town to do a cooking demo! 2 hours and 50 eggs of extremely smooth technique and the guy is 75 years old, just amazing stuff!

It was a good day.

“x George, cook with love”
-Jacques Pepin

Day21: Game Meats

Back to business as normal, now in level 2 and we’re in a new kitchen. The lesson for the day was game meats, but we roasted a chicken? I guess it was for the technique of actually roasting a bird, but chicken? Why not duck? Anyway the first recipe we learned was venison loin with a bordelaise and Pommes darphine. I seared the loin perfectly but sliced it wrong, it was still very tender. The bordelaise turned out great and overall was very happy with everything we turned out. The second, Roasted Chicken “Grandmother-Style” was awesome!

Day13: Additional Methods of Cooking Fish

I haven’t looked forward to my weekends in a very long time and I’m definitely enjoying the extra sleep on Saturday mornings.

Last Fridays lesson was an addition to thursdays fish lesson with the introduction of flat fish. Flounder was the fish of the day and we learned how to filet it and cook it using two different techniques. The first was Paner A’lAnglaise which means to bread and fry. First step is two slice the flounder filet into goujonettes (small strips) dip them in flour, then into the seasoned egg mixture and then the bread crumb. After they are all breaded and our deep frying oil is set to 350 we fry them off. We served them up with two different sauces, one was a red pepper coulis and the other was some kind of tartar sauce variation.

Next we served up a braised variation of the flounder with shallots, white wine, mushrooms, and a double cream reduction called filet de limande bonne femme. An extremely heavy dish in my opinion, that poor flounder was completely over shined by the sauce.

Tomorrow we have shellfish, and for the first time in my life SNAILS!